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Truth in Labeling: AreDescriptions All We Have?Michael Dellwing aa Kassel University , Kassel, GermanyPublished online: 08 Jul 2011.

To cite this article: Michael Dellwing (2011) Truth in Labeling: Are Descriptions All WeHave?, Deviant Behavior, 32:7, 653-675, DOI: 10.1080/01639625.2010.514206

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truth in labeling: aredescriptions all we have?

Michael DellwingKassel University, Kassel, Germany

The present article draws on some parallelsbetween pragmatism and the interactionistsociology of deviance to discuss the quest forliberatory consequences often associated with theLabeling Approach (LA). Both pragmatism and theLA exhibit a tension between theirantifoundationalist nominalism and their liberatorymeliorism. This tension revolves around thequestion if the insight that ‘‘descriptions are all wehave’’ leads to a possibility to change thesedescriptions. While many proponents of the LAhave thought so, antidualist formulations ofpragmatism have mellowed this hope withoutdestroying it: Descriptions can always change,but it is rarely antifoundationalist theory thatchanges them.

SOME PARALLEL ISSUES BETWEEN LABELINGAND PRAGMATISM

The labeling approach (LA) set out to end the ‘‘classical’’sociology of deviance: etiological questions were laymen’squestions (Becker 1963), deviance was not deviance untilit was so described and a social problem was not a problemuntil it was so defined (Spector and Kitsuse 2001). There was

Received 8 September 2009; accepted 18 March 2010.Address correspondence to Michael Dellwing, Universitat Kassel, Fachbereich 5–

Gesellschaftswissenschaften, 34109 Kassel, Germany. E-mail: dellwing@uni-kassel.de

Deviant Behavior, 32: 653–675, 2011

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0163-9625 print=1521-0456 online

DOI: 10.1080/01639625.2010.514206

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no abstract truth in deviance, no truth to the label, just namespeople use for other people in interaction. This led some for-mulations of the approach to derive from it the hope thathuman beings who had become ‘‘victims’’ of their deviantlabels could now be liberated from them. The present articlewishes to engage this hope for consequences, liberatory orotherwise, of a formulation that insists that deviant identitiesare socially negotiated names, not representations of what is.I will argue that this question has been fruitfully debated inpragmatism, a philosophy closely related to the LA. Withinpragmatism, one can identify a conflict between an antifoun-dationalist strain that emphasizes the impossibility of objec-tively anchoring descriptions and a melioristic strain thatemphasizes improvement and, perhaps, liberation of theoppressed. Whenever the melioristic strain is all too certainwho the oppressed are, antifoundationalism seems to bedrawn into question. Whenever the antifoundationalist strainis all too certain about the impossibility of anchoring descrip-tions, there seems to be nothing left to liberate. This samedichotomy—and debate— can be found in the LA.

If descriptions are all we have, are liberatory hopes falsehopes? Following Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, I will arguethat the account that there is no truth to labeling neitherleads to attempts of jettisoning stigmatizing labels nor to par-alysis. If pragmatism insists that behind descriptions, thereare only other descriptions, then it leaves the world as it is,as Stanley Fish famously insists: all the moral debates, allthe solid labels and all the liberatory hopes mobilized againstthem remain. The same could be said for the LA: While noliberation automatically follows from the account that labelsare ascriptions, as ‘‘ascribed’’ does not equal ‘‘false,’’ everylabel can always be challenged, every ascription changed,by the assertion that present labels be false. While pragma-tism finds ‘‘truth’’ an ‘‘uncashable metaphor’’ (Rorty1982:191), it is still the metaphor publicly used to changeminds. This turns us toward Rorty’s ironism—paired withclassical Deweyan pragmatist meliorism—which does con-tain the idea that describing the world as a network ofdescriptions can in fact be used for purposes of redescription(but so can anything else). While pragmatism’santi-foundationalism thus closes all routes to strong ideasof liberation from labeling, its anti-dualist and melioristic

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strains may allow for a weak form, one in which specificlabels are always evaluated, can always be changed, and fre-quently are. They need no theory as a lever for such change,be it the LA, critical criminology, postmodern or any othertheoretical enterprise. Descriptions would then indeed beall we have, but for practical, everyday interactions, thatdoes not matter, as no hopes need to be lost because of it.

PRAGMATISM BETWEEN ANTIFOUNDATIONALISMAND MELIORISM

As an indeterminate and pluralistic perspective, pragmatismcannot easily be summarized in basic propositions. If theattempt were made, one widely (although not universally)shared premise would be its antifoundationalism; another, itmeliorism. While both have at times been seen as conflictingforces, pragmatist antidualism, a third major premise wouldinsist on abandoning the quest to identify contradictions ina pluralistic universe and thus allow a formulation of pragma-tism that unites these tendencies without unifying them.

Dewey (1929) wanted philosophy to abandon the ‘‘questfor certainty’’ and the attempt to anchor explanations inmetaphysical foundations. Rather than ‘‘is it true?’’ he pro-posed that scholars ask ‘‘what would happen if we believedthat?’’ William James (1907) seconded that human beingswould be quite useless if our function was merely to repro-duce in descriptions what had already been there all alongin ‘‘truth.’’ Ideas are not representations of the worldannouncing its meaning to us, but tools with which theworld can be literally grasped. Such consistent anti-foundationalism does not posit that there is no truth or thattruths are relative, but wishes rather to stop making ‘‘truth’’a subject of discussion altogether. In Richard Rorty’s formu-lation, pragmatists ‘‘do not invoke a theory about the natureof reality or knowledge or man which says that there is nosuch thing as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a relati-vistic or subjectivist theory of Truth or Goodness. Theywould simply like to change the subject’’ (1982:14). Theywould like to stop viewing humans as explorers of the conti-nent of truth in favor of seeing them as terraformers, creativebeings whose descriptions are tools that shape and changethe world.

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While Rorty emphasizes pragmatist anti-foundationalism,Cornel West emphasizes its meliorism and radical potential.West (1989:4) sees ‘‘the distinctive appeal of Americanpragmatism in our postmodern moment [in] its unashamedlymoral emphasis and its unequivocally ameliorativeimpulse.’’ His ‘‘prophetic pragmatism is a form of tragicthought [. . .] in that it confronts candidly individual and col-lective experiences of evil in individuals and institutions’’(228). He eschews the classical objective of ‘‘groundingknowledge’’ in favor of ‘‘power, provocation, and person-ality’’ (5), thereby remaining an antifoundationalist (213),but holds that ‘‘[t]o undermine the privileged philosophicnotions of necessity, universality, rationality, objectivity,and transcendentality without acknowledging and accentingthe oppressive deeds done under the ideological aegis ofthese notions is to write an intellectual and homogenous his-tory’’ (208). West diagnoses ‘‘a yearning for principled resist-ance and struggle that can change our desperate plight’’ (4)and even wishes that this be achieved through ‘‘norms andvalues’’ as abstract outside constraints. Abstract outside con-straints are, however, exactly what is denied in Rorty’s and,even more prominently, Stanley Fish’s (1989, 1994, 1999)antifoundationalism. West’s prophetic pragmatism hereseems to waver in its antifoundationalism in favor of liber-ation. This is clearer yet when power is discussed, whereWest (1989:207) assails Rorty’s thought for being ‘‘devoidof the realities of power’’—thereby wishing for a representa-tionalist account of power that Rorty’s ‘‘too nonchalant’’ per-spective (207), a ‘‘[t]runcated neopragmatism’’ (209), doesnot give. A ‘‘move from Rorty’s model of fluid conversationto the multi-leveled operations of power’’ (211) allows theobserver to identify the ‘‘plight of the wretched of the earth’’(212) and to put pragmatism in their service. West thus letsmeliorism beat antifoundationalism in a debate that couldeasily lead to the conclusion that the two are opposites ofone another, incommensurable.

Both have been deemed opposites in pragmatist discus-sions: Stanley Fish argued that antifoundationalism preventsstrong liberatory consequences. He strongly chides both con-servative and leftist commentators: While conservativecritics of anti-foundationalism fear the perspective forits seemingly arbitrary relativism, proponents of a leftist

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(‘‘critical’’) anti-foundationalism, such as West, put highhopes in its supposed power to uproot and replace existingfoundations. Both are mistaken. Anti-foundationalism, Fishproposes, is not a program to destroy foundations, neitheris it a prelude to being able to replace them with whateverfoundations one would like to have. It is not emancipatoryin this manner, but rather nothing more than ‘‘a thesis abouthow foundations emerge [. . .] it says that foundations arelocal and temporal phenomena, and are always vulnerableto challenges’’ (1989:29–30). It ‘‘says nothing about whatwe can do or not do; it is an account of what we have alwaysalready been doing’’ (323–324). As much as that sounds likea harshly conservative argument, it is not: If theory does notrepresent a world that is, then it can offer no lever withwhich to come to ‘‘right,’’ ‘‘real,’’ or ‘‘better’’ descriptions.‘‘The fact that we now have a new explanation of how wegot our beliefs—the fact, in short, that we now have a newbelief— does not free us from other beliefs or cause us todoubt them’’ (324). There is no liberation to be gained fromtheory, only change in practice, and since there is no abstracttheory apart from practice (because meanings are notrepresentations), all possible theory is a sort of practice andtherefore a motor of change.

Fish thus eschews an abstract difference between theoryand practice that gives theory a privileged position, just asDewey (1929) did, but not the possibility for change. In hisformulation, we can then find an answer to the questionwhat will happen if descriptions are all we have, and hisanticlimactic answer is: the same as before. ‘‘These [libera-tory] consequences would follow only if I also believed inthe possibility of a method independent of belief by whichthe truth . . . could be determined; but if I believed that, Iwouldn’t be an anti-foundationalist at all. In short, the theoryhope expressed by some anti-foundationalists is incoherentwith the anti-foundationalist perspective, since it assumes,in the dream of beginning anew, everything thatanti-foundationalism rejects’’ (Fish 1989:324). The lack ofobjectively existing foundations in which to ground ourdescriptions is no free-for-all, not in the pessimist’s nor inthe optimist’s version. ‘‘This is perhaps the most surprisingand counterintuitive consequence of the denial of inde-pendent constraints: rather than leaving us in a world where

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the brakes are off, it situates us in a world where the brakes—in the forms of imperatives, urgencies, and prohibitions thatcome along with any point of view (and being in a point ofview is not something one can avoid)—are always andalready on’’ (12). These brakes are not in abstract truth orin the world, they are entirely social: Descriptions have tobe socially offered and accepted, as language games cannotbe played alone. This, however, reopens the plane for liber-ation after all: Descriptions always change, and theory canbe one sort of argument to change it. It is by far not the onlyargument and, in public discourse, by far not the most promi-nent or the most routinely successful: It fulfills that role nomore or less than everything else does.

Thus, in Fish’s anti-liberatory argument, there is alreadythe seed for the retention of meliorist hopes. This is sup-ported by pragmatist antidualism, which does not lookkindly on arguments of abstract incommensurability. Conse-quently, meliorism and the hope for a better tomorrow, veryprominent in Dewey, also figure in the antifoundationaliststrain of pragmatism. Rorty (1989:xv) expresses a ‘‘hope thatsuffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of humanbeings by other human beings may cease.’’ His meliorism,however, remains local, checked by the ironist realizationthat oppression is merely a description like all others andas such, a tool, not a truth. Rorty (1982) somewhat infa-mously stated that oppression was only a name for the sidewe do not like, as ‘‘Injustice is not bad molding of languagearound reality, it is a collective name for ways of speakingand acting generally condemned by powerful voices urgingon one cause or another’’ (Weaver 1992:746). There is muchto be said for this evaluation, which is much less insidiousthan it sounds. Of course ‘‘oppression’’ is a description ina conflict used to denounce the other side, but that is exactlythe use of this tool: One is denouncing the other side, drivenby the hope for a better society if this description takes holdand is acted on. And the other side is doing the exact samething. Rorty remains bound to the thought that, just like truthis an empty word used to pat the back of those with whomone agrees, evil is a word used to hit those on the head withwhom one disagrees. Thus, while Lynn Baker (1992:699)attributes a ‘‘prophetic strand’’ to Rorty as well, histhought is not prophetic but rather vaguely hopeful. Rorty

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(1982:161) himself does not wish to embrace prophetic prag-matism: ‘‘Emphasizing this message of social hope and liber-ation . . .makes James and Dewey sound like prophets ratherthan thinkers. This would be misleading,’’ and as much as heputs himself in a line with Dewey, this disawoval extends tohis own work as well.

Thus, there is hope in redescription, but we do not knowwhere use of these tools will lead us. The objective of suchchange remains unclear in the face of antifoundationalism,as pragmatism ‘‘brings a corrective to the emancipator agendachampioned by critical theorists’’ (Shalin 1992: 237). ForKoopman (2007:106), it is ‘‘a philosophical way of takinghope seriously.’’ Its meliorism is neither the certainty of a spe-cific better future nor a blueprint for how to achieve one, butrather ‘‘a name for . . . hardihood and willingness . . . to livewithout assurances or guarantees’’ (107). This uncertainty,to the pragmatist, is a promise (Shalin 1992:272). ‘‘The prob-lem for pragmatists is not so much that the thing in itself isunknowable in principle, but that it can be known in so manydifferent ways’’ (1986:11): If there is not one true description,but many tools, there is equally not one liberatory destination,but many, and what is liberatory in one description may bedescribed as oppressive in another.

LABELING BETWEEN ANTIFOUNDATIONALISM ANDMELIORISM

A clear line can be drawn from pragmatism via symbolicinteractionism to what has been called the LA,1 whichquickly gained mainstream appeal and can now be said tobe firmly lodged at the core of the sociology of social pro-blems. This has happened without a unified formulation,which is not a problem, but normality for interactionist per-spectives. The LA mirrors pragmatism’s antirepresentational-ist nominalism, mixed with and sometimes opposed to itsliberatory promise. It thus generated quite similar debates

1Proponents have often preferred the term ‘‘interactionist sociology of deviance,’’ butthe ascription—the label—Labeling Approach has stuck. As I have no quarrel with the term,I will retain it, not least to help relabel it away from the ascriptions positivists and criticaltheorists have given it.

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about quite similar problems. Some formulations empha-sized antifoundationalism and the negotiation of situationsthat do not bring their valuation with them, some have seenin labeling a process that is ‘‘specifically unwarranted’’(Woolgar and Pawluch 1985:223), and the latter has beenseen as contradicting the former. Contradiction is, however, acriticism from a representationalist position. An antidualist,pluralist account does not intend to offer unified, contradiction-free representations.

The LA’s main mission has been to deobjectify deviance. Itdrove a deep wedge into both classical and positivist crimi-nology (cf. Cohen 1998), denying that there is such a thing as‘‘objective deviance’’ or ‘‘objective crime’’—the positivistview that is not yet gone but still informs searches for ‘‘mur-der genes’’—but also the view that crime and deviance canbe abstractly determined by comparing behavior to norms,however contingent, local and political these norms maybe. The LA states that the truth-anchors usually taken to bethe cornerstones of a definition of deviance—crime as anobjective concept, rule-breach as an objective fact—arenot truth-anchors at all. Nothing else is meant by Becker’s(1963:9) famous postulate that deviance is not a quality ofthe behavior, but rather a label applied to it in interaction.However, while Becker still retained an idea of abstractbreaches of norms, his interactionist critics have maintainedthat norms are not blueprints for evaluations, but need to besuccessfully used against an actor in a social process.Especially Kitsuse, together with Malcolm Spector (1975),attacked Becker and Lemert for retaining objectivist formula-tions in the LA, either through a belief in a rule in Becker’s(1963) infamous table or through a belief in ‘‘primarydeviance’’ in Lemert’s (1951) career model. Kitsuse(1962:248) clarified that the LA’s goal is rather ‘‘to shift thefocus of theory and research from the forms of deviant beha-vior to the processes by which persons come to be defined asdeviant by others.’’ The question is then not if the deviantlabel is true, but rather what happens when it is successfullyapplied, with Dewey, when we believe it.

At its core, the LA thus insists that ‘‘deviance’’ is not astatement on the true status of a person’s actions, but rathera vocabulary used on someone. Just as Rorty stated in retruth, interactionist sociologists of deviance do not claim that

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there is no deviance, nor do they have a relativistic idea of it;they would simply like to stop asking questions aboutthe ‘‘essence’’ or ‘‘nature’’ of deviance and get on with ana-lyzing the social interactions and consequences of our use ofthe term, analyzing its cash-value as a tool. Kitsuse(1962:248) writes that this new perspective ‘‘requires thatthe sociologist view as problematic what he generallyassumes as given—namely, that certain forms of behaviorare per se deviant,’’ even that they are abstract normbreaches within a certain normative framework. The ques-tion of the ‘‘reality’’ of deviance is not on his itinerary, asit hinders analyzing deviance as a descriptive tool (cf. Ibarraand Kitsuse 1993). Schur (1969:310) seconds that theapproach ‘‘insists that deviant behavior can be understoodonly in terms of constantly changing states reflecting com-plex interaction processes, that it is quite misleading to treatdeviance as a static condition.’’ Also, Kai Erikson (1962:308)asserts that ‘‘[d]eviance is not a property inherent in certainforms of behavior; it is a property conferred upon these formsby the audiences which directly or indirectly witness them.’’

Opponents of the LA had, on the basis of its abandonmentof representationalism, called it ‘‘relativistic in the extreme’’(Gibbs 1966:11). But seeking the bases in common defini-tions rather than seeing these definitions as representing away things really are is exactly the point: Schur (1971:14)thinks that Gibbs is right that the ‘‘new approach’’ no longerpostulates an ‘‘unequivocal basis for distinguishing what isdeviant from what is not.’’ Deviance is not an abstract truthand yet not an illusion: ‘‘What is deviant for one is normal forthe other’’ may be a truism, but a useless one. As Rorty(1998:2) stated about truth, ‘‘ ‘true for me but not for you’and ‘true in my culture but not in yours’ are weird, pointlesslocutions.’’ If the LA stated that, it would be merely anotherformulation of subculture theory, territory in which Becker’s(1963:8) original work had treaded, where he states that sub-culture formulations are closest to his own. The LA ratherhopes, like Rorty, to change the subject; it hopes that ques-tions that presuppose the objective existence of deviancenot be asked any longer, as ‘‘the attempt to make such aclear-cut distinction is misguided’’ (Schur 1971:14). Thatdoes not mean these deviant acts do not exist: ‘‘Rather, itseems simply meaningless to try to understand and ‘explain’

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such deviations without taking into account the fact that in agiven social order they are inevitably defined and reacted toin various specific ways’’ (16). Daniel Dotter (2004:78)emphasizes this when he writes that ‘‘Deviance does not dis-appear into relativism, but is ‘transgression understood differ-ently, understood problematically.’’’ Rather, the issue is theconsequences of such accounts over above the bases forthem. Thus Becker (1963:9) writes that deviance is ‘‘a conse-quence of the application by others of rules and sanctions toan ‘offender,‘’’ ‘‘a consequence of the responses of others toa person’s act.’’ Again, this is perhaps most clearly explicatedin Kitsuse (1962:256): ‘‘A sociological study of deviancemust focus specifically upon the interactions which not onlydefine behaviors as deviant but also organize and activatethe application of sanctions by individuals, groups, or agen-cies. For in modern society, the socially significant differen-tiation of deviants from the non-deviant population isincreasingly contingent upon circumstances of situation,place, social and personal biography, and the bureaucrati-cally organized activities of agencies of control.’’ EspeciallyErikson (1966:15) emphasizes the consequences of the‘‘deviance’’ explanation: ‘‘the community’s decision to bringdeviant sanctions against one of its members is not a simpleact of censure. It is an intricate rite of transition, at once mov-ing the individual out of his ordinary place in society andtransferring him into a special deviant position,’’ therebymaintaining the group’s boundaries. Again, when one fol-lows pragmatist accounts, explanations shall be known bytheir consequences: ‘‘The essence of Aspirin is that it is goodfor headaches. James’ point, however, was that there is noth-ing deeper to be said: truth is not the sort of thing which hasan essence’’ (Rorty 1982:162). Both emphasize that explana-tions are not representations, but that, if successful, they pro-vide a vocabulary in which action can be successfullyjustified, provide ‘‘the stock of arguments to which youcan have recourse in the presentation and defense of yourinterpretations’’ (Fish 1989:15). They are ‘‘ways of gettingpeople to change their practices without admitting they havedone so’’ (Rorty 1989: 78). Again, this can be seen asthe same position interactionist sociologists of deviancehave brought to their subject. The application of the label‘‘deviant’’ to a person is a socially justifying explanation for

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otherwise disturbing behavior. This aspect can perhaps mostclearly be seen in Being Mentally Ill (Scheff 1984). Scheff,who cites Dewey (Scheff 1984:20), sees mental illness as avocabulary of explanation, not as a representation of truth.‘‘The culture of the group provides a vocabulary of terms forcategorizing many norm violations: crime, perversion, drunk-enness, and bad manners are familiar examples. After exhaust-ing these categories, however, there is always a residue of themost diverse kinds of violations for which the culture providesno explicit label’’ (34). It is a vocabulary that is brought to thesituation when the vocabularies of normalization and of crimefailed to deliver the intended results in negotiating theinterpretation of the situation; it thus mirrors pragmatist anti-foundationalism. Rorty (1982:160) opined that ‘‘[a]s long aswe see James or Dewey as having ‘theories of truth’ or ‘theoriesof knowledge’ or ‘theories of morality’, we shall get themwrong.’’ Equally, as long as we see labeling proponents ashaving ‘‘theories of deviance,’’ we shall get them wrong.

LIBERATION AND THE POLITICS OF DEVIANCE

The tradition was at first misunderstood as a new perspectiveon causation, then fiercely opposed by causally oriented per-spectives (Gibbs 1966; Gove 1970). Many descriptions of theLA focus heavily on Lemert’s concept of secondary deviance,which often deemed to state, as two randomly chosen con-temporary textbooks put it, that ‘‘crime may be heightenedby criminal sanctions’’ (Carrabine et al. 2004) and that ‘‘it[is] the imposition of control that essentially ‘cause[s]’deviance’’ (Innes 2003:19). Another introductory workattributed to the LA the thesis that ‘‘other factors’’ than‘‘actual behavior’’ were the ‘‘causes’’ for the deviant label(Burke 2005:145). Especially positivist sociologists ofdeviance saw these as testable hypotheses which theyquickly moved to ‘‘falsify,’’ thus dragging the approach ontofoundationalist scientific terrain from which it does not stemand on which it had not intended to compete (see Petrunik1980). The liberatory perception of the LA is connected tothe foundationalist one: in it, ‘‘labels’’ are understood asnames given above and beyond the ‘‘real self’’ to whomthe labels do injustice. Akers (1968:463) famouslybemoaned this tendency by stating, ‘‘One sometimes gets

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the impression from reading this literature that people goabout minding their own business, and then ‘wham’-badsociety comes along and slaps them with a stigmatizedlabel.’’ A contemporary textbook that offers an overall verygood and quite sympathetic elaboration on symbolic interac-tionism in deviance studies writes that ‘‘It is argued thatsocial action cannot be a response to people as they ‘really’are and in every detail’’ (Downes and Rock 2007:160), usingquotation marks on ‘‘real’’ but continuing to state, ‘‘After all,encounters are often brief and much is unknown, concealed,irrelevant, or ambiguous.’’ More strikingly, Burke (2005:107),whose overview is much less sympathetic, calls the approachpart of a ‘‘victimized actor tradition’’ the most importantimpact of which was, in his opinion, to contribute to ‘‘radicalcriminology’’ (142).

The LA came to maturity in an age in which oppositionaldiscourses attempted to free sexuality, self-realizationthrough the use of narcotics, and defend the socially disad-vantaged against a system that proponents of the LA thoughtcaused their suffering. Petrunik (1980: 214) notes that the LA‘‘probably received the attention it did because it was a con-venient weapon with which largely liberal critics couldattack the social control establishment.’’ Becker (1967:240)proclaimed his ‘‘deep sympathy’’ for the victims of the label-ing process whom he famously called ‘‘at least as good asanyone else’’—thus: better—, ‘‘more sinned against than sin-ning.’’ Katovich and Reese (1993:397) found that Beckerhere reminded ‘‘the sociological community of its responsi-bility to the dynamics of partisanship or its attention to theexploited, vulnerable, and powerless—to those actors whosuffered within a ‘hierarchy of credibility.’’’ If ascriptions ofdeviance are political (Schur 1980), then identities are polit-ical battlefields: ‘‘The story of deviance and social control isa battle story. It is a story of the battle to control the wayspeople think, feel, and behave. It is a story of winners andlosers and of the strategies people use in struggles with oneanother. Winners of the battle to control ‘deviant acts’ arecrowned with a halo of goodness, acceptability, normality,’’Stephen Pfohl writes (1994:3). Especially Pfohl emphasizesthe power axis when he continues that ‘‘Deviants exist onlyin opposition to those whom they threaten and those whohave enough power to control against such threats’’ (3).

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Studies thus focused on the losers of the battle: the mari-huana consumer (Becker 1963), homosexuals (Kitsuse1962, 1980), and the socially disadvantaged at-large (Schur1970). The LA was understood as postulating the repro-duction of marginalized identities by means of social controland as offering tools to oppose this dynamic: A criticaldeconstruction of these reproductions. Schur proposedRadical Non-Intervention (1973) as the adequate responseto these actors and turned instead to analyzing Our CriminalSociety (1970). The approach seemed to follow a trajectorythat led straight to abolitionism, the position that in orderto pacify society, one should abolish the criminal justice sys-tem altogether (Christie 1981). This is not entirely unconnec-ted to the classics, as it represents the critical bent of Lemert’ssecondary deviance conception: If societal reactions fortifydeviant roles, one now has a scientific weapon with whichto assault crime control policies. Pfohl (1994:4) follows Westin submerging antifoundationalism under liberation when heasks of the stigmatized, ‘‘Are their actions truly more harmfulthan the actions of people not labeled deviant? In many casesthe answer is no.’’ He thus falls back on a seemingly objec-tified criterion of harmfulness to then ask rhetorically, ‘‘whatabout the people most responsible for the oppressiveinner-city conditions that lie at the root of many gang-relatedactivities? What about the ‘gangs’ of bankers whose illegalredlining of mortgage loans blocks the investment of moneyin inner-city neighborhoods?’’ (4). The difference, Pfohlmaintains, is in the differential access to ‘‘dominant institu-tions’’ (4), thus turning those with access into conformists,those without into deviants. Next to the objectified criterionof harmfulness, there is now the objectified criterion ofaccess to power. He shows his cards when he assumes thatthe official reasons are only a facade on the real, economicreasons for deviance ascription, which has ‘‘more to do withwhat society economically values than with whether thething is physically harmful per se’’ (5). The ‘‘per se’’ buriesantifoundationalism in favor of liberation.2

2Reinhard Kreissl calls this phenomenon ‘‘constructionism split along normative lines’’:The constructed nature of what is criticized is upheld, but the alternative construction thatreplaces it is somehow considered ‘‘real’’ (2006, cf. also Dellwing 2008).

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The LA’s deobjectification of deviance thus soon led to afocus on power and politics, just as pragmatism’s antifounda-tionalism gave rise to its meliorism and West’s propheticpragmatism. Many theorists thought that criticizing labelsas oppressive stigmata was in fact interactionist, but such lib-eratory objectives have also often been seen as in violation ofthe approach’s antifoundationalist tenets. Lemert (1974:459)has criticized this use of his ‘‘secondary deviance’’ conceptand has distanced himself from the labeling school on thesegrounds, viewing the critical twist as ‘‘a disservice to Mead’’:‘‘the extreme subjectivism made explicit by the underdogperspective, reflecting sympathy for the victim and antipathytoward the establishment, [. . .] distorts by magnifying theexploitative and arbitrary features of the societal reaction.But more important, it leaves little or no place for humanchoice at either level of interaction.’’ Piven (1981:491) sec-onds that ‘‘The societal reaction school bought pity for thedeviant by weaving a theory in which the fact of devianceas human action, human action oriented toward some pur-pose, was extirpated’’ in favor of ascribing such agency tothe reactors: ‘‘Only the powerful had a capacity to act pur-posefully by enacting and enforcing rules’’ (491). WhilePaternoster and Iovanni (1989:375) state that ‘‘It is the sym-bolic interactionist tradition within labeling theory that leadsto the conceptualization of the ‘stigmatizing’ and ‘segregat-ing’ effects of social control efforts,’’ Woolgar and Pawluch(1985:223) criticized as odd that ‘‘Societal reactions todeviance are held to be (mere) imputations and yet are takento be specifically unwarranted.’’ They go on calling this lib-eratory perspective ‘‘ontological gerrymandering,’’ as itsstrategy ‘‘depends on making problematic the truth statusof certain states of affairs selected for analysis and expla-nation, while backgrounding or minimizing the possibilitythat the same problems apply to assumptions upon whichthe analysis depends’’ (216). Hammersley (2001:95) sum-marizes that ‘‘The constructionist and realist versions oflabeling theory are incompatible. It is not possible to identifydiscriminatory or spurious labeling if deviance cannot beidentified independently of the labeling process.’’ Justas ‘‘criminal’’ is a consequence of a social reaction thatlabels a behaviour criminal without the availability of ananchor of ‘‘real’’ criminality it would merely represent,

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‘‘oppression,’’ ‘‘stigmatization’’ and the like are also labelsthat do not merely represent ‘‘real’’ oppression and stigmati-zation; the West–Rorty debate is faithfully reproduced here,as is Fish’s intervention. However, if pragmatist antidualismdiscourages choosing one side over another, this applies tochoosing antifoundationalism at the expense of meliorismin the LA as well. The ‘‘pragmatist sensitivity to indetermi-nacy, contingency, and chaos’’ (Shalin 1992:238) leads itto deemphasize systemic-structural arguments (249) andclear dichotomies. ‘‘[S]ociety is a semiordered chaos routi-nely generating unanticipated consequences’’ (266). A prag-matic antidualism would attempt to view them as different,pluralistic formulations of a chaotic world of talk rather thanas opposites.

ANTIDUALISM IN LABELING

If a judgment is not a representation, but rather an ‘‘inevi-table and inescapable’’ (Fish 1994: 39) part of perception,any judgment can only be replaced by other judgments,and without a God’s eye perspective, what is liberation forone will be oppression for another. Goode (1975: 573)recognized the same thing: ‘‘The very inclusion of an actwithin a certain category implies a certain attitude towardsit. ‘Murder,’ ‘incest,’ and ‘robbery’—terms you and I use tocharacterize acts we deem to fit—may (or may not) be uni-versally condemned, but if they are, it is because each ofthose words is already predefined and ‘loaded with moraldisapproval.’’’ The lack of that specific label is not a normalor a superior state, and oppressive can also not be a qualityof the label: Every meaning is ascribed in interaction, be it‘‘breach of the norm’’ to behavior, ‘‘deviant’’ to persons,‘‘oppressive’’ to labels as enacted definitions, or ‘‘ascription’’to deviant categories and the persons put into them. If ‘‘thereis no truth’’ does not follow from pragmatism, then ‘‘there isno deviance’’ (and the strong liberatory trajectory associatedwith it) does not follow from the LA. Deviance is real whenbehavior has been successfully described as deviant. A per-son is deviant if s=he has been successfully described assuch. Any and every such description could have been differ-ent (and in many situations still will be, as society is nota unitary universe holding just one opinion); none of the

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infinite number of available descriptions is true because itcorresponds with a deeper reality behind it. It merely sepa-rates the world into things called one name and things calledanother and according valuations to each. ‘‘If we have todescribe ourselves,’’ Rorty (1999:19) writes of pragmatists,‘‘perhaps it would be best for us to call ourselves‘anti-dualists’. This does not, of course, mean that we areagainst what Derrida calls ‘binary oppositions’: dividingthe world up into the good Xs and the bad non-Xs willalways be an indispensable tool of inquiry.’’ Good, nondevi-ant Xs and bad, deviant non-Xs: Deviance is a way of order-ing the world. Adler and Adler define ours as a ‘‘deviancesociety’’ where ‘‘By defining the other side as deviant, moralentrepreneurial and advocacy parties stigmatize and disem-power each other’’ (2006:133), always thereby definingsociety and social groups in the process. This process isone of identity-work in multiple directions, where identitiesare ascribed to those who are labeled, to those who label,and to the groups they represent. They are never justone-way-streets as they are, for one, always negotiated, butalso at the same time always go along with identity-workof those who use the descriptions (Dellwing 2009). Thesedescriptions are not true in the strong, representationalistsense, but since there are no descriptions that representtranspractical Truth, they are true in every sense that counts.In everyday practice, it is impossible to act without namingand categorizing that toward which we act (in the very actof acting). To think otherwise is to ‘‘make the mistake ofthinking that by telling people that there is something thatthey have never been able to do—leave the realm of practicefor a realm more general and abstract—you take somethingaway from them; but of course you can’t take away acapacity no one has ever had’’ (Fish 1989:26–27).

The same goes for liberation: Just as you cannot take awaya capacity no one has ever had, to liberate people from devi-ant labels that fail to represent their true selves, you also can-not take away a capacity we have always been unable to dowithout, negotiating descriptions in everyday interactionthrough action. Descriptions are all we have and have everhad. However, that insight does not change anything aboutthe practice of ascribing deviant identities, resisting theseascriptions, and socially debating and negotiating them.

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There are formulations of the LA that span the rift betweenantifoundationalism and liberation and can thus be viewedas exhibiting a developed antidualism: Edwin Schur’s workmay be such a candidate. He (1980:1) states that our ‘‘com-placent unawareness of the power configurations andmanipulations that necessarily and continuously shape ourlives’’ creates a situation in which enlightenment is a precon-dition for liberation from dominant power structures. If thisdoes not happen, then existing power is ‘‘sustained and rein-forced’’ in deviance ascriptions. However, Schur presents anantifoundationalist picture of this situation, where a ‘‘stigmacontest’’ is not dependent on ‘‘objective’’ power (7) but anopen game with an unpredictable outcome (7). For Schur,sociology can describe the struggle, but not the right out-come, as ‘‘there is no way for a scientific ‘referee’ to establishthe correctness’’ of any stigmatization (10), as ‘‘deviance out-comes . . . are not simply made, but, instead they emerge’’(87). Again, the antifoundationalist and liberatory elementsof interactionism come into contest, and in Schur’s version,there is no clear decision on relative weight. Thus, Schur’streatment is more antidualist than many other liberatory per-spectives that ‘‘gloss over several important factors: thediversity of substantive areas in which deviance-definingoccurs . . . the multiplicity of group interests and social forcesthat may come into play; the mixed or ambiguous intereststhat some groups may have; the inevitable limitations onabsolute control that confront the state apparatus or rulingelite even in situations where they might seek to exert it’’(70). One of the most insightful works that have taken thispragmatist antidualism seriously is Daniel Dotter’s CreatingDeviance, a postmodern reevaluation of the interactionistsociology of deviance. Nothing is anchored; rather, ‘‘Thecomponents of the labeling process—actors, acts, rules,audiences, and societal reactions—constitute a fluid,dynamic description of stigmatization’’ (2004:8). Harkeningback to Schur’s stigma contests, Dotter expands the con-test from stigmata to an ‘‘unpredictability of outcomeand social consequence’’ in addition to the alreadymentioned rules and audiences, all of which create theiridentities in a play of labels in contested situations, ‘‘aproblematic situated process, a set of interrelated stigmacontests involving numerous primary as well as secondary

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performers and audiences’’ (10), a ‘‘layered interactiveprocess’’ (10). Also, it is a process that is never finished:‘‘Meaning is never fully accomplished; it is constantlynegotiated and reworked as a textual process of differ-ance’’ (30), as ‘‘the emergent meaning of any situation(i.e., rules as well as labels) possesses no inherent finality’’(102). Following a media and cultural studies perspective,Dotter identifies three layers of meaning production, theevent, the media reproduction and finally the ‘‘stigmamovie’’ in which the cutouts are publicly traded to bereapplied at the level of the deviant events and their mediarepresentation (37–39), with the ‘‘scenario’’ linking thethree layers (40) as ‘‘an attempt to deconstruct or unravelthe textual nature of the stigmatization process, thus dem-onstrating the multiple interpretations given to the socialgeneration of deviance’’ (9). Deviance is thus ‘‘situatedalongside the cultural politics of meaning’’ (14)—while,with Adler and Adler, it is at the same time one of the cen-tral fields on which these meanings are negotiated. Thismakes stigma contests into ‘‘ideological contests’’ (133)where social stratification is negotiated in deviance ascrip-tion, making deviance central to the self-definition ofsociety, a point that was made by Erikson (1966), althoughmuch less explicitly. Once this process is in motion (and itis always already in motion), it extends far beyond thelabeling of deviance and identities, which are producedand then consumed in media settings (Dotter 2004:9, 30,et al.): ‘‘Normative=legal relations, definitions of acts,and societal reaction are all negotiable in the process ofreconstruction’’ (42). In Fish’s (1998) words, ‘‘Not any-thing goes, but anything that can be made to go goes’’;Dotter (2004:87) seconds that ‘‘It is not so much that any-thing goes, but that what goes in any particular circum-stance is put together by actors in concert.’’ Whereactors have liberatory aspirations, they will devise strate-gies to lodge their descriptions in the talk of others, tobound the talk of others through normative, principled,theoretical, functionalist, hedonistic, or whatever otherrhetoric they hope will work, always opposed by thosewho feel (correctly) that their talk is threatened by it. Inthese contests, there is always the hope that ‘‘the present[is] a transitional stage to something which might, with

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luck, be unimaginably better’’ (Rorty 1999:30)—better asdescribed in someone’s talk.

DESCRIPTIONS ARE ALL WE ALWAYS HAD: THERE ISDEVIANCE EVEN IF THERE’S NO TRUTH TO IT

Thus, the question if ‘‘descriptions are all we have’’ can beanswered with a resounding: yes, but. As consequences ofpragmatism are not that the world falls apart because theword ‘‘Truth’’ and the search for it have been discredited,the same can be said for the LA: its consequences are notthat we stop talking about there being deviance or therebeing rule breaches. The antifoundationalism at the rootof pragmatism and the LA teaches us that names and deli-mitations for phenomena are social achievements, notrepresentations of a description the world itself would pick.We can know that there are no rule breaches in the strongsense (i.e., until someone labels something a rule breachand succeeds in subsequent negotiations) and that there isno deviance in the strong sense (e.g., Rorty 1999:30). Thatdoes not mean, and in fact can never mean, that there areno rule breaches and there is no deviance. It merely offers aredescription of what rules breaches are and how theyemerge in situations as tools brought on to change descrip-tions, to change action. This insight was lost on some lib-eratory formulations of the approach, which seemed totend towards the idea that now, there is no deviance andthe so-called deviants are rather victims of state stigmatiza-tion who should justly be left alone, an interpretation thatcan still be found in contemporary summaries (see above).This conclusion depends on the ontologically gerryman-dered view that there is no objective deviance, but thereis objective liberation, that negative labels are shows tobe ‘‘false,’’ but positive labels remain ‘‘true.’’ It is also pre-dicated on the confused notion that an antifoundationalistargument dislodges what it deconstructs. If descriptions,that is, labeled deviance, is all the deviance we have, ofcourse that is deviance. It is in no way false, and the insightin no way proves other labels ‘‘right.’’ These deviantdescriptions elicit all the etiological work done before aswell, which is the continuation of meaning-ascriptionthrough scientific action and, once one believes in the

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ascription, is simply what would happen. It in no waybecomes ‘‘lay’’ or false science afterward.

Thus, indeed, descriptions are all we have, both in cases ofdeviance ascription, in scientific talk about deviance, and inthe ascription of liberation. However, the latent negativetaste of this statement requires the ‘‘but.’’ Since descriptionsare social, practical achievements, they are not arbitrary asopposed to rigorous, not illusions as opposed to realities.Deviance ascriptions and deviance theorizations needapproval in social circles to be true in every possible sense,and while, in principle, any and all descriptions could gainsuch approval (not just the ones vouched for by an imagined‘‘real reality’’), only some will gain such approval; ‘‘there areno constraints on inquiry save conversational ones—nowhole-sale constraints derived from the nature of objects, or of themind, or of language, but only those retail constraints providedby the remarks of our fellow inquirers’’ (Rorty 1982:165). Thereis thus a practical boundary, and only a practical one, to talk,built by the talk of others and their willingness to accept ourtalk. All that makes a description a radically social affair: Inthe question that serves as the headline of this article, the oper-ative word is, as always in sociology, we. This We can nowvery well ‘‘liberate,’’ by redescribing something that was onceseen as ‘‘right’’ as now ‘‘wrong,’’ something that was once seenas ‘‘not getting its just deserts’’ as ‘‘liberation.’’ However, this isa practical, not a theoretical achievement: It is a consequencepractice can always elicit, not a consequence of having‘‘shown’’ that ‘‘deviance is only a description.’’

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MICHAEL DELLWING, B. A., Georgia Southern University, 2003; M.A., Kassel Univer-sity, 2005; Ph.D., Kassel University, 2009. Currently Assistant Professor of sociology atKassel University, Germany. Recent publications on the sociology of mental illness,interactionism in deviance studies, and sanctions theory.

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